Microsoft's experiment in "social sorting" for e-mail went slightly awry, but we hope the company will keep trying.

In the world of e-mail, separating the wheat from the spam is difficult enough. But what about separating the choice kernels from the rest of the wheat? Within your mountain of legitimate e-mail, how can you quickly zero on the really crucial stuff, like instructions from your boss or questions from your clients?

Microsoft has proposed an answer: SNARF, or Social Network and Relationship Finder. Designed for Microsoft Outlook 2002 and 2003, this free add-onwhich actually runs outside of Outlookgives you an at-a-glance overview of your Inbox. But instead of sorting the messages themselves, SNARF sorts the senders, pulling "important" ones to the top of the list. The idea is that your most frequent correspondents are the most important. It's a nifty idea, but the tool itself is confusing at firstand downright fugly.

Getting started is easy: Download and install the 2MB program, then wait several minutes while it scans your Outlook messages and builds its index. (Subsequent scans, performed each time you reboot, take less than a minute. And you can refresh from the menu at any time.) The resulting three-pane, side-docked window divides mail into three categories, creating a kind of messaging triage.

By default, all three panes display a week's worth of messages. SNARF lets you add, remove, and customize panes, as well as tweak the metrics used to sort the messages. (If you're using a scroll mouse, it's all too easy to change the settings inadvertently.) The top pane, awkwardly titled "Unread To/CC me," lists only those senders who put your name in the To or CC field. The second pane shows the senders who didn't specify your name (meaning they're probably distribution lists). The benefit of these groupings seems tenuous.

The bottom pane is the catch-all, listing every correspondent from the past week, including those who were simply sent the same messages as you. Next to each name, SNARF displays the number of messages received and sent in the last 30 days. Behind each name, a blue highlight reflects this number, effectively turning each pane into a graph of message volume. At least this pane is somewhat useful. Clicking any name brings up a clickable list of all correspondence with that person for the specified period, no matter which folder it's in.

That makes sense, but on our tests, SNARF produced odd results. For instance, instead of limiting itself to week-old mail, all three panes listed a handful of senders we hadn't corresponded with in years. Some of these were one-time messages from people we'd never even answered. Another glitch in SNARF's social accounting: For some reason, one tester's mother didn't make the top-pane "cut," even though he corresponds with her regularly (really!). We should note that another tester did not encounter these anomalous results.

SNARF doesn't function as an e-mail viewer per se; messages ultimately open in Outlook windows. It does, however, offer a thread view that, though useful, is somewhat cryptic and unattractive. And speaking of looks, SNARF itself is none too pretty, with all the visual appeal of a Microsoft Windows 3.1 program.

With any luck, Microsoft will build these kinds of management functions into the next version of the product, rather than relegating them to an outside program. SNARF doesn't solve the problem of e-mail overload, but it does provide some relief.

SNARF

fair

Bottom Line: Microsoft's experiment in "social sorting" for e-mail went slightly awry, but we hope the company will keep trying.

SNARF

SNARF

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